The Crane Wife
by mexicantt
Summary: All I ever meant to do was to keep her. AU/AH
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer:** Twilight isn't mine.

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I woke up alone, as I had on every other morning of my life, lying on my stomach with the blanket at my heels and pillows pushed off my bed sometime in the night to rest together on the floor.

My left arm reached out over the rumpled sheets, seeking traces of the warmth that had never been there before she came into my life. She crashed in, a whirlwind of life and love and lust; so fleeting. I knew from the moment my eyes found her still form that I would never see another.

I also knew deep within me that she would never be mine to keep.

Still, I could not prevent myself from forming hopes and weaving dreams around her.

_Mi linda,_

_Ma jolie femme,_

_Mia bella donna._

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**A/N:** I hate these things with a passion, so let me make it short - I'm reworking this story. I'll update as regularly as I can, but make no promises. Also, forgive me my lack of a beta, please. I do my best to watch the grammar and spelling. Feel free to let me know should you catch something, though.


	2. Chapter One

**Disclaimer:** Twilight isn't mine.

**A/N:** Thanks to the lovely Lady who beta'd for me.

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My body jerked awake, straining for coordination as my mind struggled to catch up from its sleepy state. It appeared I had dozed off in front of the fire yet again. That was the fourth time in as many days. I had no real excuse for the apparent exhaustion; it had been nearly two years since my illness had finally passed me over and I had retired to this cabin to convalesce.

'_Convalesce, my ass,'_ I thought. _'There will never be enough time to recover from this.'_

I seemed to rarely make it to bed anymore, likely in a lame subconscious desire to escape from my dreams. As if I had to be in bed to dream. Nothing would keep those dreams from me.

Nearly every night since I recovered and became aware enough to understand what had happened while I was incapacitated, I had been haunted in my sleep by images of my parents. It was always the worst when my memories of those last months were the ones to visit me: stepping out of the airport nearly delirious with fever and dropping to the floor as my mother screamed; waking up at the emergency room to a simple diagnosis and two frantic parents; my mother, her hair swept up into a messy bun as she leaned over me with a cool washcloth trying to get my fever down; my father speaking in hushed tones just outside of my bedroom door with the doctor's office on the phone; rolling on to my side, my favorite sleeping position, only to cry out at the pain; the whirlwind of a return to the emergency room and Mom holding my hand and Dad giving me a shaky smile; coming out from under the anesthetic to see her for the last time, face shining with tears and a genuine smile while she squeezed my hands as I faded back under the spell of the drugs.

Some nights, though, I got a reprieve and was able to remember the good times. I would see my first Little League baseball game, my dad making it just in time to see me make my first run; my mom catching me jerking off while talking to my first girlfriend on the phone when I was fourteen; the subsequent trip with my father to the drug store two towns over while he had The Talk with me and bought me my first pack of condoms that ended up expiring before I was ready to use them; both of them in the car with me at the wheel, my father's face turning an amusing shade of red as he spluttered at me to slow down, my mother in the backseat laughing while I eased off the gas to avert my father's impending heart attack; Mom's hair whipping in my face the summer after I turned sixteen as we screamed our way down Goliath, a rollercoaster in California; camping the month before that in the Grand Canyon National Park. Dad in a ridiculous pair of rubber pants as he attempted to fish; receiving my college acceptance letters to every school but my number one choice, and Dad sitting me down with my first taste of hard liquor while he commiserated with me; my high school graduation and the hundreds of pictures Mom took of me before, during, and after the ceremony; packing up my car for the long drive to my first year of college, mom and dad waving from the driveway while she struggled not to cry.

Faster and faster the images came back to me until my head was bowed, cradled in my hands as I pulled my hair to distract me from the pain threatening to overwhelm me.

Every night, I relived my childhood with two loving and doting parents. Every morning when I woke, my eyes were bloodshot and puffy from tears, the sheets tangled around my body. My cheek was invariably stuck to the sheet beneath it as my tears dried throughout the night, my head and heart pounding. It had been that way since the doctors broke the news while I was in my hospital bed.

'_My fault. It was my fault.'_

As I sat there poring over things I had been attempting to forget for the better part of two years, I heard a muffled _thump thump thump_ at the door and realized that when I woke in my chair, my cheeks weren't damp, and though sluggish, my head had not been pounding.

'_Who in the world could that be?'_ I mused to myself. Being "off the grid" tended to help with the anonymity I sought, as this cabin was hardly considered near civilization when it took me at least thirty minutes to reach this place from the nearest highway. And, admittedly, I may have a bit of a lead foot so it would take most people a bit longer than that.

I slowly stood and scanned the room for my gun. Technically it was just a BB gun because while I had a shotgun in a case near the back door, I'm not so stupid as to open the door with one of those loaded. But whoever was outside didn't need to know that. Finding it on the bench near the door with the panel where I kept my keys, I went to retrieve it and decided to place it in the waistband of my jeans. It seemed a common enough place to put it, in the line of sight of whoever was out in the middle of the woods thumping at my door in the dead of night. Hopefully they wouldn't look too closely. It was pretty convincing, but not if you were familiar with real guns.

I unlocked the two deadbolts and the little lock on the doorknob, but left the security lock on. Better safe than sorry, after all. Or maybe living alone in the woods for two years had made me just a mite paranoid. Could have been either one. As I prepared to open the door I took a breath to steady my nerves then opened it a hair.

At first I was confused. There was no one there. _'But I could have sworn…?'_ My ruminations were cut short when I heard a low moan coming from the area near my feet. I shut the door and opened the hinged security door guard, then flung the door open, nearly hitting myself in my haste.

She was wearing a plain white dress that looked like it would go down to her ankles if she were standing, with a thin white sweater over the top. Her feet were bare, scratched and bleeding. After looking past her to the dark footprints on my deck and following them down the stairs to a rough furrow in the snow leading from the densest part of the tree line, I could only assume they were wounds gathered on a shoeless trek through the forest.

Moonlight bathed her, made her all but glow with a simple beauty that took my breath away. Her eyes were closed, her skin too pale and her face relaxed with her lips slightly open. Her eyebrows and eyelashes made a stark contrast against her skin, and her lips blended in too well to be a sign of good health. I could barely see the rise and fall of her chest as she lied there on her side with long dark hair sprawled around her. Her arms were crossed in front of her body, as if she had been trying to hold herself together before she fell unconscious at my door.

So consumed was I by her appearance that I failed to notice something fairly obvious.

The wood beneath the shoulder she was lying on was rapidly turning red with what could only be blood seeping through her clothes. As I looked I could see tendrils of red slowly staining their way across her ridiculously, _pristinely_, white clothing. I dropped to my knees and turned her body so she was lying flat on her back and it seemed to force an involuntary gasp out of her. Moving my eyes to her shoulder, I was met with possibly the most bizarre sight I had ever seen.

'_How the fuck did she manage to get an arrow stuck in her shoulder?'_


	3. Chapter Two

**Disclaimer:** Twilight isn't mine.

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**Chapter Two**

For a minute I knelt there, shock numbing me so thoroughly that I was just hovering over her prone form like a dumbass while she bled on my doorstep. My eyes were flicking around all over the scene in front of me, landing first on her clothes that were rapidly staining crimson, flashing down to her torn and bloodied feet, then up to my truck just completely covered in snow to the point where I knew I wouldn't be able to even open the door, and further back to find the trenches and footsteps in the snow. I could see by the moonlight that they were tinged with crimson, leading back toward the trees on the left of my little cabin.

After what felt like an hour but was probably minutes at most, I finally snapped out of my funk, only to have a mild form of panic to descend upon me in its place.

I didn't have more than a two-year-old basic first aid kit that I used to keep in my truck, which I'd used at least twice since I first came to the cabin.

I had no wireless service. In fact, I hadn't touched my cell phone in so long I wasn't even sure if it still worked.

My truck was clearly buried and the roads were all but obliterated with feet of snow and no plow in sight. The one little shovel I used to get out to my car and the shed in back was not going to do a damn thing to help me.

And I never did bother to get that land line set up, preferring to live without contact from the rest of the world, which meant no phone and sure as fuck no internet.

Still, if I was going to do anything to help her, it needed to be done quickly. The temperature here was below zero according to the outdoor thermometer bolted to my wall outside, and she was wearing so little. It would be a miracle if she wasn't entering the second or third stages of hypothermia by now.

Bending over her while thanking the fuck out of the gym equipment that I got to help me regain some strength once the fatigue had left me, I gathered her legs over one arm and tried to place the other behind her neck while trying not to jostle her injured left shoulder. I didn't think I succeeded.

I rocked back into a crouching position and stood easier than I had expected to, turning into my home and using my foot to clumsily close the door behind me. The idea of using my BB gun for intimidation was laughable now as I felt her body push it into my stomach, making me feel foolish enough to let out a weak chuckle. Taking her over to my couch, I set her down as gently as I could and raced over to the closet between the front door and my bench to pull out a blanket, frantically trying to remember where I had last seen that fucking first aid kit. Why I failed to keep it somewhere that made sense, like the kitchen or the bathroom, had never seemed to matter before I recalled kicking it under my bed months ago. I shook out the heavy wool blanket my Nana knit for my parents when they got married and walked over to my couch, draping it over the girl who was now bleeding onto my couch.

'_Fuck, Masen, she needs a fucking towel! Damn it, Mom picked that couch out…'_

Shaking my head to clear my thoughts, I remembered I still needed a first aid kit, and now a towel. I realized "somewhere under my bed" was a lousy spot for a first aid kit when I bent down to feel for it because my arm couldn't reach it; me and my fucking California King bed. Crawling halfway underneath, my fingers finally brushed the side of the clear plastic box as I stretched further to retrieve it.

Once it was in my hands, I took it into the bathroom with me, rooting around in the linen closet for a towel I could toss after using. Grabbing a couple, I ran back into my living room and over to the girl passed out on my couch. I opened the ten-dollar kit and started dumping things out. After sorting through a large glow stick, some weird silver blanket thing, an instant cold compress, and about half a dozen tongue depressors I managed to set aside the things I needed: alcohol prep wipes, gauze, that weird medical tape that feels kind of like fabric, a pair of tweezers, and small sterile scissors. I took two latex gloves out of a small plastic bag, put them on, and hoped to fuck she wasn't allergic.

Turning her onto her right side a bit, I moved the injured shoulder into the light provided by the fire since I didn't have any overhead lighting in the room, and used the scissors to cut across the seam of the sweater and down to the broken shaft of the arrow protruding a couple of inches from her wound. After I peeled that away, I worked on cutting her dress in the same manner and was relieved when I got down to skin. The edges of the wound were a little more than slightly puckered and the blood was still trickling out. Taking one towel and placing it beneath her shoulder, which thankfully wasn't bleeding onto the furniture yet, I knelt down and laid one hand on the top of her shoulder to keep her body steady. Glad she was still out cold, I took a bit of the arrow's shaft in my other and, trusting that this would work and not make things worse, gave a hard tug on it.

The squelching noise it made as it slid out of her shoulder made my stomach roil.

I looked at the arrow and was pleased to see it had no head; it was simply tipped with a pointed bit of metal at the end. Tossing it aside, I brought my attention back to the wound and barked out a quick, "Shit!"

I had failed to realize moving the arrow would allow more blood to escape and it was all but gushing out. For a moment I was reminded of all that fake blood used in the first Kill Bill movie. Then my brain started working again and I scrambled for the towel at my knees, pressing it hard to the wound to try and stem the bleeding. After some time had passed with me putting as much weight onto her body as I dared, I gently lifted the towel and hoped that the blood hadn't dried it to her wound.

It hadn't.

I bent down to get the alcohol prep pads opened and started swabbing the area clean. It was awkward but not too difficult to reach the other side without needless manhandling. When I had used all but two prep pads I was trying to save for her feet, I looked at the wound and noticed it wasn't as large as the amount of blood coming out of it had suggested. It was maybe a centimeter or two in diameter.

Taking the gauze from the packages, I put about five or six layers on each side and covered the entire thing with tape.

I stood and stepped back to throw the used alcohol pads and assorted bandage wrappers away as well as wash the latex smell from my hands, and looked at her face. She had remained completely unresponsive the entire time I was working and it worried me that she could sleep through the pain.

Then I noticed that her lips, which had been a pleasant, if pale, pink color when I first saw her were tinged with purple.

"Fuck! What the hell am I supposed to do?"

I just kept shouting random words like "shit!" and "fuck!" as I stalked to the kitchen to get rid of the trash and tried to remember anything and everything I've ever learned about hypothermia.

'_Okay, just calm down. Calm down. Freaking out isn't going to help her. She needs to get warm._

'_The fire! I can put her by the fire!_

'_Wait, no, that's a bad idea. She'll get too warm too fast. Okay, something else. Something else…like a warm bath? I can't just drop her into the tub, she could drown. Shitfuckcocksucker, I don't know what to do with her.'_

My panic was spiraling and at least ten minutes had passed since I first brought her in.

'_Body heat! God, I've got to strip her down and get next to her.'_

Finally having a plan, I started pulling at my clothes, nearly ripping my pants as I tripped out of them in my hurry. I took the blanket and spread it out on the area rug, about five feet from the wood stove that sat inside the decorative fireplace and turned back to my mystery woman. I slipped her sweater off of her other shoulder and felt around in the back for the zipper to her dress. My fingers made contact with buttons and I struggled to undo them from my position in front of her. At last I had the last one open and I tugged it down, the long sleeves pinning her arms to her sides as I pulled it down her body.

I tried not to look at her, not to leer, but my eyes wouldn't obey me and they swept over her legs, her torso, and lingered on her chest.

'_I am such a pig. But fuck me if she isn't perfect…'_

Snapping out of my lecherous staring I contemplated stripping her down even further. Somehow I didn't think I could control my reaction if we were both nude and under a blanket in front of a suddenly romantic fire, stuck in my cabin with no way for the world outside to interfere, her innocent white bra and panties decorating my floor…

Okay, so maybe I hadn't snapped out of it as much as I thought I had.

While I started berating myself in my head for having those thoughts about a girl who was unconscious and literally on her way to freezing to death, I picked her up and shuffled to the blanket on my knees.

I placed her on her right side closest to the fire, laid down behind her, reached behind me to the rest of the blanket, and wrapped us both up while I spooned myself around her back.

I had no idea what more I could do and hoped that when she woke up she wouldn't be pissed to find a naked guy up on her back. I also hoped when she woke up that I wouldn't be sporting the wood that was currently growing and reaching toward her ass like it was magnetic north and my dick was just a compass trying to get home. That might be hard to explain.

As I continued to have these thoughts, the adrenaline that had galvanized me into action earlier was beginning to wear off and I was hit with a wave of drowsiness. Giving into the urge to fall asleep, I curled my right arm under me, put my head on it, and brought her closer to me with my left arm around her waist.

With any luck the morning would bring her to consciousness and me some answers.


	4. Chapter Three

**Disclaimer:** Twilight isn't mine.

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**Chapter Three**

When I awoke to thin streams of sunlight filtering in through the curtains, the wood stove had nearly run out of fuel and my arm had fallen asleep. Disoriented and a bit confused, I couldn't understand when my bed had become so uncomfortable or why it felt as though my stomach was stuck to something. I never woke up still on my side and if anything was stuck in the morning, it was my face to the sheets for some odd, unexplainable reason.

Okay. So maybe I drool a little sometimes. A lot of people do it. It's not like it's something I can help.

Then the previous night came back to me in a flood of images: dark hair strewn across my doorstep; a white dress steadily becoming red; bloodied, scratched feet; a broken arrow protruding from her left shoulder; a white bra, with matching panties; slim, strong-looking legs; breasts.

Oh _yes_, breasts.

And I was under a blanket with her, completely nude. Now that I was thinking about it, I could feel the underside of her breasts brushing the top of my arm with every steady breath she took. Relief momentarily flooded through me to know she was still breathing and had made it through the night. Then my male brain focused on the silky feel of her bra against my skin.

I could feel my cock stiffening at that last thought and peeked into the blanket to see if there was enough room for my sudden arousal without accosting the woman when I noticed something glistening on my stomach curiously close to my…

'_Oh, God. Oh God oh God oh God, I jizzed on her in my sleep. I need to clean this. It needs to go away, before she wakes up and calls me a pervert and jumps out of this cozy space under the blanket to show me those perfect, pert little breasts again. Oh God, her breasts, I want to touch them, don't they look like they would fit so perfectly in my hands? I bet they are soft and firm and her nipples will probably get tight when my fingers brush them. Or perhaps they would feel better with my cock nestled in between, so smooth and supple, her hands holding them close to me..._

'_Shit, if I don't stop this line of thought now I'm going to fucking rut against her ass again and then there will be more to clean.'_

I focused on slithering out of the blanket as though it were a zipped sleeping bag, trying to get out without pulling it off of her. My dick went limp as the cold air made contact with the wetness that was unfortunately and embarrassingly smeared all over it.

'_Ugh. That took care of _that_.'_

I tried to make as little noise as possible on my way to the bathroom for a washcloth and turned my head to look back at my sleeping beauty, which was pretty stupid of me because I caught my bare toe on a runner and fell. Sprawled out with my ass in the air and my face to the floor, I froze to listen for any sounds of movement behind me and thanked my lucky stars that I could hear nothing. Figuring even if she had woken up and was staring at my dangling man-bits that I would prefer not to have to face her from this mortifying position, I took a deep breath and slowly stood back up. I brushed my knees off and finished my walk to the bathroom with my eyes glued to the floor. I searched in the small closet in there for a washcloth or small towel and found one with some girly scroll pattern on it and started to smile when I remembered just who picked it out. That smile didn't even get a chance to live.

Shaking my head to dispel the memories, I went to the sink and turned on the tap to wait for some warm water. After it warmed up, I used the washcloth to clean my nighttime excitement from myself and after washing it out again, went back to the living room. Kneeling next to the blanket by the fire, I hoped there wouldn't be anything to wipe off of her.

When I looked I was pleased to note that she looked like she hadn't moved. That meant no memories of my ungainly little spill onto the floor earlier.

And that was good. I had no idea what she would think of me or being in my home when she woke up, and my naked ass cheeks somehow didn't strike me as the best first impression to make.

I knelt down next to her stomach and slowly pushed the blanket off of her. I could see that her bandage all but soaked through with blood during the night and hoped I had enough material left to make another.

Tilting her body toward me I was able to take a look at her back and grimaced when I saw that there was in fact some of my mess on her. I sincerely hoped she would not wake up with what I had to do.

Before it could get much cooler, I took the warm cloth and tried to gently clean her.

'_At least it hasn't had a whole lot of time to dry. That would be harder to scrape off.'_

That thought made me feel a little better and I managed to wipe her off with only a weak sigh escaping her lips.

Her color was better this morning and she felt warm to the touch now.

I reached over her for the blanket once more and wrapped it around her so I could make my way to my closet and look for some clothes. I seemed to have nothing but thermals, t-shirts, and jeans in there. But, you know, considering the freezing cold that was my cabin at the moment and how rarely I went out in the summer, it kind of made sense.

I pulled out a pair of thermal pants, two thermal Henleys, a pair of jeans, and a couple pairs of thick socks. I wasn't the only one who needed to be dressed in something warm, after all.

After dressing quickly, I sat on the bed to pull on my socks and let my mind drift over to my mystery woman. I needed to clean her feet, and I needed to clean and dress the wound on her shoulder again. My pathetic first aid kit was still lying on the floor next to my couch where I left it last night, and I needed to go through it again and see what all was left. I remember leaving a couple of alcohol prep pads for her feet, but as I never did take a close look at them I hoped that whatever bandages were in there would work. There might have been a bigger first aid kit somewhere, but if I could avoid having to search through all the crap, I would.

Picking up the clothes I had picked out for her, I went back to the living room and placed them on my Lazyboy so I could put some more wood into the stove. Closing the front when I was done, I went to the foot of the couch and picked up the remnants of the first aid kit, taking it over to her. Retrieving the washcloth I used to erase the evidence of my nocturnal emissions, I went back to the bathroom to rinse it out once more and get a fresh towel.

'_Holy fuck, that would have been so embarrassing to have her wake up while I was cleaning her. I probably should have put some clothes on first. I would hate to think what a woman would do to wake up nearly naked with some random stranger wiping her back and his dick practically hanging in her face because he was too stupid to put on some pants first or even go behind her to clean her off.'_

Sometimes my innate stupidity astounded even myself.

Shaking my head at myself, I washed the cloth out again. Once it was sufficiently clean, I took some soap and rubbed it on until it was leaving suds on my hands and wrung out most of the water, then set it to the side. I went back to the cupboard and took out another washcloth, the mate to the one I had soaped, and a towel. I wet the second cloth with hot water, wrung it out, and took all three with me back to our little makeshift bed by the fire.

I made sure to only lift the blanket up to her calves so she could stay warm, and I set to work on cleaning the debris, dirt, and dried blood from her feet as gently as I could. I picked up the soapy cloth first and sat myself down with my legs crossed at her feet. I lifted her legs and scooted closer, laying both feet gently back down in my lap. I picked up her right foot and started cleaning the arch slowly. I didn't know if the dried blood was the result of scraping or if it was due to splinters or something bigger that had managed to actually lodge itself into the soles of her feet. They didn't look calloused, so I was worried it was the latter. The corner of the cloth I was using grew steadily dirtier and I was relieved to only see small scrapes and one cut that was maybe two inches long on her heel. I took another corner and worked it in between her toes. The blood had managed to find its way into every little nook and cranny and I was debating on whether I should get something to try and clean under her toenails, too.

I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I didn't notice her other foot twitching in my lap or the mild shaking of her body. However, I _did_ notice when her left foot suddenly shot out and kicked me in the chest as she gasped, pulled her right foot out of my loosened grip, and scrambled on one hand to get away from me.


End file.
